Howl For Dean
by Mancuso
Summary: Dean gets high in the motel room by himself and hallucinates to the Beat of the late great Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."


AN: This is a short thing I have just written at midnight with extreme abdominal lady cramps and without drugs. Not that you care, but I feel like complaining. This is not completely structured after Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Anyone who's familiar with the poem will recognize a few sentences here and there that are modeled partly if not wholly after lines in the first part of the poem. The poem does not spark any familiarity with Supernatural, I was just looking for a modeling exorcise (Hah, pun! Get it? JK) to practice varying my sentence structures. If you are not familiar with Howl, you may still get this, but the significance of the parallel will be utterly and irretrievably lost on you. Also, Allen Ginsberg is my phantom lover. Lol. This is a tribute, not a robbery. All credit to the inspiration that is Ginsberg and the Beat Generation as well as Lord Kripke. I own nothing, I gain nothing.

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Dean had seen the best hunters of this generation destroyed by the flaws of their own personalities. And now his brother seemed to be headed down a similar blood and self-interest paved road. What to do about it? The half-shadow twilight had come already, infusing the light and atmosphere with the fairy magic of evening time. The room was washed first in yellow, then orange, then a pinkish purple and Dean was satisfied just to lean on his elbows, propped and probed by it. The most engaging film played on the bare white wall and only for him. The air was still dry with the smoke from ten minutes ago. It normally depressed Dean to smoke alone, but Sam had left for "research" three hours ago, and there wasn't much else to do. Dean considered masturbating over an x-rated pay-per-view film, but something wasn't in him for it tonight.

He thought of all the hunters he'd idolized in his youth. His father, Caleb, Pastor Jim and countless others. Not a one of them had lived to see the end of the world. Bloodshot eyed, cotton mouthed, dazed and high, Dean sat up in the cool open-windowed evening motel room and imagined the whole lot of his predecessors. A cemetery's worth of them all, wrapped in burial shrouds that were never burial shrouds, but white cotton sheets, rather, in which they were bundled, bound, and burned.

The thought made him shiver, reel, and scoot back against the wall in a sudden and unexplainable paranoia. Thoughts turned from battlefield companions to bed companions who'd had the magic in their fingers, mouths, cunts, and cocks. Who made parts of Dean into a disappearing act, and likewise, were made love to in the early hours of dawn. Dean held a funeral for them, here and now, for the dead and the not-yet-dead because before long, he might not have the time for any lamentation.

He conceived an image of himself dressed in black. The mass funeral was not a trench, but a mile-long pyre on which all shapes and sizes ranging from the very large to the very small who could only have been children were laid out shoulder to elbow to shoulder to shoulder to larger-than-the-body-bundled infant head. Sam was not with him. Bobby was not with him. He was alone with the matches, but over his shoulder on the top of a steep hill behind him sat Castiel in his true form. No longer blindingly white, instead a dingy gray. His wings flexed impatiently as he waited for Dean to light the matches and set the pyre ablaze. Dean allowed himself to wonder over the absences of Sam and Bobby once more before striking the match, lighting it's mates, and tossing the book.

The smell and the heat woke the sheet people. They wiggled and squirmed but did not speak. They made animal groans that were muffled, caught in the cloth that covered their mouths. The first on the pyre, nearest to Dean was the tallest of the entire group. Sam. But Dean did not move to save him, because he was standing in quick sand. How could he have over-looked that?

Blinked once. Blinked twice. Finally the pictures were gone. Conquered. The color on the wall was no longer infused with pink. It was all purple, now. Dean was sitting in a room that was a bruise that was a death-trap dream machine when he was so high. He imagined Sam dragging himself through the trash littered streets at dawn, busting in the door late and hurt and sorry. The library would be closed by now. Would've been closed for two hours and Sam was not home.

"It's 7:25...do you know where your baby brother is?"

Hysterical dope-head peals of laughter rang in Dean's ears for a portion of a minute before he recognized them as his own. He had stubbed out the roach that was left of his joint an hour ago now, and it looked more appealing than it had then. He picked it up with his pliers and lit it with his bic. Sucking down the last few centimeters burned his lips, and when Sam came home tonight, if he did, he would notice the dryness of Dean's lips, the redness of his eyes, the oiliness of his face, and the stale air trapped in his hair and clothes. He would be upset, but he wouldn't say anything. And how could he say anything with that sheet wrapped so snuggly about his head?

Dean had seen the best hunters of his generation go down in flames, fighting righteously and awesomely for what was good and right and pure. Dean had already gone down once, and he went down screaming, terrified, without dignity, and fighting to save his own ass. This time, it seemed his final death may be less honorable. Dean stood on junk-wobbly legs that brought him to the window. He leaned against the ledge, looking out but not up. He pressed his forehead to the screen, staring at the cement street below him where bums and prostitutes and endless endless evil ran on forever for miles in every direction, unstoppable and undefeated. He threw back his head and howled.

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AN: Yeah...I'm definitely not expecting rave reviews here, lol. I don't know if anybody who reads this will know what the fuck kind of connection I'm making. I'm not even sure myself. But I do want to point out to anyone who's interested that the seemingly meaningless reference to Dean masturbating was not just wankage on my part. I was actually attempting (and possibly failing, I don't know) a set-up for his hallucination later. I wanted it to parallel with Ginsberg's vision of Walt Whitman as he masturbated in his apartment in his younger years. (Yeah, I know...Dean didn't actually masturbate while he had his vision, but that would've been in poor taste and then I would've had to live with it, lol.) Also, I seem to have this strange fetish for portraying Dean as a pothead. I'm not entirely sure that's all he's smoking, here though, since Mary Jane is not a hallucinogen. Maybe he's shrooming. Who knows. Or smoking Salvia. I'll leave that up to anyone who had the patience to read this far. ;)


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